'Little Failure' succeeds in the end

By Kathy Lowry, For the Express-News

Updated 3:51 pm, Friday, January 24, 2014

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SAN ANTONIO — In a blurb for novelist Gary Shteyngart's memoir, “Little Failure,” writer Mary Karr proclaims the story of this Russian Jewish immigrant's metamorphosis from a “little failure” (his mother's nickname for him) to a big literary success “unputdownable.”

Alas, I found the first few chapters of this sometimes tragic, sometimes comic story harder to pick back up than put down. Pairing his trademark black humor with even darker tales of the slaughter and persecution of most of his Soviet Jewish family at the hands of Stalin, Lenin and Hitler doesn't make for easy reading. But once his tale shifts mostly to the present, this raw memoir is indeed compelling.

A sickly, asthmatic child, little Igor (renamed Gary) was 7 when he emigrated from Leningrad with his parents to Queens in New York. Not only was he a stranger in a strange new world, he endured abuse at home. His depressed, angry father subjected him to arbitrary whippings and called him Snotty. His equally miserable mother routinely subjected him to extended silent treatments. His alienation was exacerbated by his schoolmates, who found this timid, scrawny, wheezing outsider wearing Russian fur hats and speaking little English an easy target for bullying.

If this isn't enough to push a reader to Augusten Burroughs' “Running With Scissors” for comic relief, we learn in excruciating detail about the badly botched circumcision his parents subjected him to at age 9.

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Writing well, he senses early on, is the only thing he excels at — along with making people laugh. Sadly, the thing he craves — romantic love — eludes him. As do hopes of an Ivy League ticket to Gatsby-world, since his drinking and drugging in high school severely affected his grades.

Instead, he settles for Oberlin, “a college established in 1833,” he deadpans, “so that people who couldn't otherwise find love, the emotional invalids and Elephant Men of the world, could do so.” On the bright side, he was the star pupil in the creative writing program, and he finally meets a nice girl, who later moves across the country, leaving him disconsolate.

From this point on, the book does indeed become hard to put down. Shteyngart comes through on a promise he made earlier in this memoir: to “no longer approach a certain truth, only to laugh at it, then scurry back to safety,” as he did in his autobiographical novels — “The Russian Debutante's Handbook,” “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story.”

True to his word, this “little failure” unsparingly depicts himself as a creature as devoid of compassion as he is full of callous opportunism.

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Little Failure

By Gary Shteyngart

Random House, $27

This once-abused child predictably abuses anyone who loves, supports or believes in him. Finally, a repeatedly mistreated friend writes him a tough-love letter, saying, “you are as mean and ungenerous to yourself as your parents are; they taught you well.”

Sobered by the truth, Shteyngart cuts back on his drinking and undergoes intensive psychoanalysis. He flies to Russia to come to terms with his past, and applies to creative writing programs. Then a miracle occurs: An editor buys his six-years-in-the-making first novel.

In several poignant scenes, it's obvious that Shteyngart will never truly make peace with his parents. At a family lunch celebrating the publication of his first book, his father, who dreamed of being an opera singer, sneers, “I burn with black envy at you, since you got to be artist, not me.” Later, he cruelly quotes a blog from the Russian Internet that he and his novels “will soon be forgotten.”